Treatment of Polish citizens by occupiers

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This article deals with the treatment of Polish citizens by occupation forces during the Second World War (1939 - 1945). For discussion of treatment of Polish citizens by race, see Holocaust in Poland and Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles.

In the beginning of the war (September, 1939) the territory of Poland was divided between the Nazi Germany and the USSR. By the late-1941 the Soviets were overrun by Nazi Germany over entire territory of the former Second Polish Republic but the 1944-1945 the Red Army's offensive drove the Nazi forces out.

After both occupiers divided the territory of Poland between themselves, they conducted a series of actions aimed at suppression of Polish culture and and repression of much of the Polish people. Over 6 million Polish citizens - nearly 21.4% of Poland's population - died between 1939 and 1945 [1]. Over 90% of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Germans and Soviets [1].

Contents

[edit] Treatment of Polish citizens under German occupation

See also: Holocaust in Poland and Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles

It was German policy that the (non-Jewish) Poles were to be reduced to the status of serfs, and eventually replaced by German colonists. In the General Government all education but primary education was abolished and so was all Polish cultural, scientific, artistic life. Universities were closed and many university professors, along with teachers, lawyers, intellectuals and other members of the Polish elite, were arrested and executed. In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were planned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944.

The Polish civilian population suffered under German occupation in several ways. Large numbers were expelled from areas intended for German colonisation, and forced to resettle in the General-Government area. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Germany for forced labour in industry and agriculture, where many thousands died. Poles were also conscripted for labour in Poland, and were held in labour camps all over the country, again with a high death rate. There was a general shortage of food, fuel for heating and medical supplies, and there was a high death rate among the Polish population as a result. Finally thousands of Poles were killed as reprisals for resistance attacks on German forces or for other reasons. In all, about 3 million (non-Jewish) Poles died as a result of the German occupation, more than 10 percent of the pre-war population. When this is added to the 3 million Polish Jews who were killed as a matter of policy by the Germans, Poland lost about 22 percent of its population, the highest proportion of any European country in World War II[3].

Rather than through being sent to concentration camps, most non-Jewish Poles died through in mass executions, starvation, singled out murder cases, ill health or forced labour. Apart from Auschwitz, the main six "extermination camps" in Poland were used almost exclusively to kill Jews. There was also camp Stutthof concentration camp used for mass extermination of Poles. There was a number of civilian labour camps (Gemeinschaftslager) for Poles (Polenlager) on the territory of Poland. Many Poles did die in German camps. The first non-German prisoners at Auschwitz were Poles, who were the majority of inmates there until 1942, when the systematic killing of the Jews began. The first killing by poison gas at Auschwitz involved 300 Poles and 700 Soviet prisoners of war, among them ethnic Ukrainians, Russians and others. Many Poles and other Eastern Europeans were also sent to concentration camps in Germany: over 35,000 to Dachau, 33,000 to the camp for women at Ravensbruck, 30,000 to Mauthausen and 20,000 to Sachsenhausen, for example.

[edit] Treatment of Polish citizens under Soviet occupation

Red Army cavalry in Lviv, 1939.
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Red Army cavalry in Lviv, 1939.
1939, Residents of a small town in Western Belarus assemble a meeting to the Red Army arrival. Russian text reading "Long Live the great theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin-Stalin" contains spelling error.
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1939, Residents of a small town in Western Belarus assemble a meeting to the Red Army arrival. Russian text reading "Long Live the great theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin-Stalin" contains spelling error.
Sovietization propaganda poster addressed towards the Western Ukrainian population. The Ukrainian text reads: "Electors of the working people! Vote for joining of Western Ukraine into the Soviet Ukraine, for the united, free and thriving Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Let's forever eliminate the border between Western and Soviet Ukraine. Long Live the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic!"
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Sovietization propaganda poster addressed towards the Western Ukrainian population. The Ukrainian text reads: "Electors of the working people! Vote for joining of Western Ukraine into the Soviet Ukraine, for the united, free and thriving Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Let's forever eliminate the border between Western and Soviet Ukraine. Long Live the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic!"
Monument To those who fell or were murdered in the East, Warsaw
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Monument To those who fell or were murdered in the East, Warsaw

By the end of Polish Defensive War the Soviet Union took over 52,1% of territory of Poland (circa 200,000 km²), with over 13,700,000 people. The estimates vary; Elżbieta Trela-Mazur gives the following numbers in regards to ethnic composition of these areas: 38% Poles (ca. 5,1 million people), 37% Ukrainians, 14,5% Belarussians, 8,4% Jews, 0,9% Russians and 0,6% Germans. There were also 336,000 refugees from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews (198,000)[2]. Areas occupied by USSR were annexed to Soviet territory, with the exception of area of Wilno, which was transferred to Lithuania, although soon attached to USSR, when Lithuania became a Soviet republic.

While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to the Soviet ideology,[3] which in reality meant the thorough Sovietization of the area. Immediately after their conquest of eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of sovietization[4][5] of the newly-acquired areas. No later than several weeks after the last Polish units surrendered, on October 22, 1939, the Soviets organized staged elections to the Moscow-controlled Supreme Soviets (legislative body) of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine[6]. The result of the staged voting was to become a legitimization of Soviet partition of Poland[7].

Subsequently, all institutions of the dismantled Polish state were being closed down and reopened with new mostly Russian directors and more rarely[2] Ukrainian ones[2]. Lviv University and many other schools were reopened soon but they were restarted anew as Soviet institutions rather than continued their old legacy. Lviv University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. The tuition, that along with the institution's Polonophile traditions, kept the university inaccessible to most of the rural Ukrainophone population, was abolished and several new chairs were opened, particularly the chairs of Russian language and literature. The chairs of Marxism-Leninism, Dialectical and Historical Materialism aimed at strengthening of the Soviet ideology were opened as well.[2] Polish literature and language studies ware dissolved by Soviet authorities. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to it from Kharkiv, Kiev universities. On January 15, 1940 the university was reopened and started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula.[8].

Simultaneously Soviet authorities attempted to remove the traces of recent Polish control of the area by eliminating much of what had any connection to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general.[2] On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly-introduced rouble, which meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight[9].

All the media became controlled by Moscow. Soviet occupation implemented a political regime similar to police state[10][11][12][13], based on terror. All Polish parties and organizations were disbanded. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist with organizations subordinated to it.

All organized religions were persecuted. All enterprises were taken over by the state, while agriculture was made collective[14].

According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of former Poland[15], automatically acquired the Soviet citizenship. However, since actual conferral of citizenship still required the individual consent, residents were strongly pressured for such consent[16] and the refugees who opted out were threatened with repatriation to Nazi controlled territories of Poland [1] [17][18].

In addition, the Soviets exploited past ethnic tension between Poles and other ethnic groups, inciting and encouraging violence against Poles calling the minorities to "rectify the wrongs they had suffered during twenty years of Polish rule"[19]. Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. Soviet propaganda claimed that unfair treatment of non-Poles by the Second Polish Republic was a justification of its dismemberment. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to perform killings and robberies[20]. The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown.

Initially the Soviet rule gained much support, especially among the non-Polish population of the territories whose being subject to the nationalist policies of interwar Poland caused a substantial resentment against the Polish institutions and, sometimes, against the Poles in general. Much of the Jewish and, especially, the Ukrainian population initially welcomed the unification with the rest of Ukraine which Ukrainians failed to achieve in 1919 when their attempt for self-determination was crushed by Poland. [21] This was even strengthened by a land reform in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled "kulaks" and dispossessed of their land which was then divided among poorer peasants.

However, soon afterwards the Soviet authorities started a campaign of forced collectivisation, which largely nullified the earlier gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas. At the same time, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian peasants, who saw the Soviet power as an opportunity to start political or social activity outside of their traditional ethnic or cultural groups. Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all groups equally, regardless of their political stance[22].

An inherent part of the Sovietization was a rule of terror started by the NKVD and other Soviet agencies. The first victims of the new order were approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the USSR during and after the Polish Defensive War[23]. As the Soviet Union did not sign any international convention on rules of war, they were denied the status of prisoners of war and instead almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers[24] were then murdered (see Katyn massacre) or sent to Gulag[25]. Thousands of others would fall victim to NKVD massacres of prisoners in mid-1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Similar policies were applied to the civilian population as well. The Soviet authorities regarded service for the pre-war Polish state as a "crime against revolution"[26] and "counter-revolutionary activity"[27], and subsequently started arresting large numbers of Polish intelligentsia, politicians, civil servants and scientists, but also ordinary people suspected of posing a threat to the Soviet rule. Among the arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia were former prime ministers Leon Kozłowski and Aleksander Prystor, as well as Stanisław Grabski, Stanisław Głąbiński and the Baczewski family. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January of 1940 the NKVD aimed its campaign also at its potential allies, including the Polish communists and socialists. Among the arrested were Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Peiper, Leopold Lewin, Anatol Stern, Teodor Parnicki, Marian Czuchnowski and many others[28].

Approximately 100,000 former Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation.[29] The prisons soon got severely overcrowded[22] with detainees suspected of anti-Soviet activities and the NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region[7]. The wave of arrests led to forced resettlement of large categories of people (kulaks, Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors or osadniks, for instance) to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union [5]. Altogether roughly a million people were sent to the east in four major waves of deportations[30]. According to Norman Davies[31], almost half of them were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941[32].

While formal Polish sovereignty was almost immediately restored, in reality the country remained under the firm Soviet control as it remained occupied by the Soviet Army until 1952, when they received formal permission to remain in Poland from the pro-Soviet government of People's Republic of Poland. Soviet troops finally left Poland only in the 1990s. To this day the events of those and the following years are one of the stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. Polish requests for the return of property looted during the war or any demand for an apology for Soviet-era crimes are either ignored or prompt a brusque restatement of history as seen by the Kremlin, along the lines of "we freed you from Nazism: be grateful."[4]

[edit] Consequences

Over 6 million Polish citizens - nearly 21.4% of pre-war population of the Second Polish Republic - died between 1939 and 1945. [5] Over 90% of the death toll involved non-military losses, as most civilians were targets of various deliberate actions by the Germans and Soviets. [6]

Both occupiers wanted not only to gain Polish territory, but also to destroy Polish culture and the Polish nation as a whole. [33]

Tadeusz Piotrowski, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire has provided a reassessment of Poland’s losses in World War Two. Polish war dead include 5,150,000 victims of Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and the Holocaust, the treatment of Polish citizens by occupiers included 350,000 deaths during the Soviet occupation in 1940-41 and about 100,000 Poles killed in 1943-44 during the massacres of Poles in Volhynia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Losses by ethnic group were 3,100,000 Jews; 2,000,000 ethnic Poles; 500,000 Ukrainians and Belarusians.[7].

The official Polish government report prepared in 1947 listed 6,028,000 war deaths out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews; this report excluded ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian losses. However historians in Poland now believe that Polish war losses were at least 2 million ethnic Poles and 3 million Jews as a result of the war. This revision of estimated war losses was the topic of articles in the Polish academic journal Dzieje Najnowsze # 2-1994 by Czesław Łuczak and Krystyna Kersten.

Another assessment, Poles as Victims of the Nazi Era, prepared by USHMM, lists 1.8 to 1.9 million ethnic Polish dead in addition to 3 million Polish Jews [8]

Losses by geographic area were 3.3 million in present day Poland and about 2.3 million in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union.

POW deaths totaled 250,000; in Germany (120,000) and in the USSR (130,000).[34]

The genocide of Roma people (porajmos) was 35,000 persons.[35]. Jewish Holocaust victims totaled 3,000,000[36]

See also World War II casualties for comparisons.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c (English) Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide.... McFarland & Company, 295. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. See also review
  2. ^ a b c d e (Polish) Elżbieta Trela-Mazur (1997). Włodzimierz Bonusiak, Stanisław Jan Ciesielski, Zygmunt Mańkowski, Mikołaj Iwanow: Sowietyzacja oświaty w Małopolsce Wschodniej pod radziecką okupacją 1939-1941 (Sovietization of education in eastern Lesser Poland during the Soviet occupation 1939-1941). Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 294. ISBN 83-7133-100-2., also in Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie, Wrocław, 1997
  3. ^ (Polish) Wojciech Roszkowski (1998). Historia Polski 1914-1997. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Naukowe PWN, 476. ISBN 83-01-12693-0.
  4. ^ (Polish) various authors (1998). Adam Sudoł: Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 września 1939. Bydgoszcz: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna, 441. ISBN 83-7096-281-5.
  5. ^ a b (English) various authors (2001). “Stalinist Forced Relocation Policies”, Myron Weiner, Sharon Stanton Russell: Demography and National Security. Berghahn Books, 308-315. ISBN 1-57181-339-X.
  6. ^ (Polish) Bartłomiej Kozłowski (2005). „Wybory” do Zgromadzeń Ludowych Zachodniej Ukrainy i Zachodniej Białorusi. Polska.pl. NASK. Retrieved on March 13, 2006.
  7. ^ a b (English) Jan Tomasz Gross (2003). Revolution from Abroad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 396. ISBN 0-691-09603-1. [1]
  8. ^ Ivan Franko National University of L'viv. Retrieved on March 14, 2006.
  9. ^ (Polish)Karolina Lanckorońska (2001). “I - Lwów”, Wspomnienia wojenne; 22 IX 1939 - 5 IV 1945. Kraków: ZNAK, 364. ISBN 83-240-0077-1.
  10. ^ (English) Craig Thompson-Dutton (1950). “The Police State & The Police and the Judiciary”, The Police State: What You Want to Know about the Soviet Union. Dutton, 88-95.
  11. ^ (English) Michael Parrish (1996). The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953. Praeger Publishers, 99-101. ISBN 0-275-95113-8.
  12. ^ (English) Peter Rutland (1992). “Introduction”, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9. ISBN 0-521-39241-1.
  13. ^ (English) Victor A. Kravchenko (1988). I Chose Justice. Transaction Publishers, 310. ISBN 0-88738-756-X.
  14. ^ (Polish) Encyklopedia PWN, "OKUPACJA SOWIECKA W POLSCE 1939–41", last accessed on 1 March 2006, online, Polish language
  15. ^ (Polish) various authors, Stanisław Ciesielski, Wojciech Materski, Andrzej Paczkowski (2002). “Represje 1939-1941”, Indeks represjonowanych, 2nd, Warsaw: Ośrodek KARTA. ISBN 83-88288-31-8. Retrieved on 24.
  16. ^ Jan Tomasz Gross (2003). Revolution from Abroad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 396. ISBN 0-691-09603-1. [2]
  17. ^ Jan T. Gross, op.cit., p.188
  18. ^ (English) Zvi Gitelman (2001). A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Indiana University Press, 116. ISBN 0-253-21418-1.
  19. ^ Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, Princeton University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-691-09603-1, p. 35
  20. ^ Gross, op.cit., page 36
  21. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1988). “Ukrainian Collaborators”, Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland, 177-259. ISBN 0-784-0371-3. “How are we ... to explain the phenomenon of Ukrainians rejoicing and collaborating with the Soviets? Who were these Ukrainians? That they were Ukrainians is certain, but were they communists, Nationalists, unattached peasants? The Answer is "yes" - they were all three”
  22. ^ a b (English) Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt (corporate author), Gottfried Schramm, Jan T. Gross, Manfred Zeidler et al. (1997). Bernd Wegner: From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941. Berghahn Books, 47-79. ISBN 1-57181-882-0.
  23. ^ Encyklopedia PWN 'KAMPANIA WRZEŚNIOWA 1939', last retrieved on 10 December 2005, Polish language
  24. ^ Out of the original group of Polish prisoners of war sent in large number to the labour camps were some 25,000 ordinary soldiers separated from the rest of their colleagues and imprisoned in a work camp in Równe, where they were forced to build a road. See: (English) Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre. Institute of National Remembrance website. Institute of National Remembrance (2004). Retrieved on March 15, 2006.
  25. ^ (English) Marek Jan Chodakiewicz (2004). Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939-1947. Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-0484-5.
  26. ^ (English) Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1996). A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II. Penguin Books, 284. ISBN 0-14-025184-7.
  27. ^ (Polish) Władysław Anders (1995). Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Lublin: Test, 540. ISBN 83-7038-168-5.
  28. ^ (Polish) Jerzy Gizella (November 10 2001). "Lwowskie okupacje". Przegląd polski (November 10).
  29. ^ (Polish)REPRESJE 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich (Repressions 1939-41. Arrested on the Eastern Borderlands.) Ośrodek Karta. Last accessed on 15 November 2006.
  30. ^ The actual number of deported in the period of 1939-1941 remains unknown and various estimates vary from 350,000 ((Polish) Encyklopedia PWN 'OKUPACJA SOWIECKA W POLSCE 1939–41', last retrieved on March 14, 2006, Polish language) to over 2 millions (mostly WWII estimates by the underground. The earlier number is based on records made by the NKVD and does not include roughly 180,000 prisoners of war, also in Soviet captivity. Most modern historians estimate the number of all people deported from areas taken by Soviet Union during this period at between 800,000 and 1,500,000; for example R. J. Rummel gives the number of 1,200,000 million; Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox give 1,500,000 in their Refugees in an Age of Genocide, p.219; in his Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917, p.132. See also: Marek Wierzbicki, Tadeusz M. Płużański (March 2001). "Wybiórcze traktowanie źródeł". Tygodnik Solidarność (March 2, 2001). and (Polish) Albin Głowacki (September 2003). Piotr Chmielowiec "Formy, skala i konsekwencje sowieckich represji wobec Polaków w latach 1939-1941". Okupacja sowiecka ziem polskich 1939–1941, Rzeszów-Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN 83-89078-78-3.
  31. ^ (English) Norman Davies (1982). God's Playground. A History of Poland, Vol. 2: 1795 to the Present (in English). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 449-455. ISBN 0-19-925340-4.
  32. ^ Bernd Wegner, From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941, Bernd Wegner, 1997, ISBN 1571818820. Google Print, p.78
  33. ^ Judith Olsak-Glass, Review of Piotrowski's Poland's Holocaust in Sarmatian Review, January 1999.
  34. ^ Vadim Erlikman. Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5-93165-107-1
  35. ^ Donald Kendrick, The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies. Basic Books 1972 ISBN 465-01611-1
  36. ^ Martin Gilbert. Atlas of the Holocaust 1988 ISBN 0-688-12364-3

[edit] External links

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